


Rocket Ships and Planets

by Teavat



Series: Ninety-Nine Problems (and being trans in a stone world is not one of them) [1]
Category: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: Byakuya is Best Dad, Gen, Senku is trans, Trans Male Character, speculative transition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:34:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21997588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teavat/pseuds/Teavat
Summary: ”I’m going to be a boy,” Senku, age seven, tells her father one morning over breakfast. ”I’m going to learn how to do that next.”"No, you're not," Byakuya says, and then spends the next two hours wanting to slap himself.
Relationships: Ishigami Byakuya & Ishigami Senkuu
Series: Ninety-Nine Problems (and being trans in a stone world is not one of them) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1703308
Comments: 31
Kudos: 383





	Rocket Ships and Planets

One morning, Senku pauses halfway through her routine of picking random foods from the table and depositing them in her bowl. Sensing an approaching Moment, Byakuya looks up from the essays he’s grading.

Senku clears her throat like she’s about to give a speech. It looks adorable on a seven-year-old. ”I’m going to be a boy,” she tells him. ”I’m going to learn how to do that next.” Declaration over and done with, she reaches for Grandma Ishigami’s home-made umeboshi.

Byakuya’s honestly no longer surprised by anything that comes out of his kid’s mouth, but this one almost manages it. He looks at Senku, with her stick-up hair and almost pouting look of concentration, lower lip sticking out as she repeatedly tries and fails to extract a plum. It doesn’t seem that strange, now that he thinks about it. Ladylike little Senku would be _much_ harder to imagine.

That plum is really giving her trouble. His ma always makes umeboshi in impractical, narrow-necked bottles. Even Byakuya struggles to fish them out, and he’s had decades of practice. Yet here is Senku, once again trying to do it all on her own.

He says the first thing that comes to mind: ”No, you’re not.”

-

It takes two hours to persuade Senku to come out from under the blanket and talk to him again. During that time, Byakuya curses silently and heartily at his habit of speaking first and thinking about what comes out of his mouth only second. When Senku finally emerges, nose runny and eyes red, Byakuya bundles her up into a roll and tucks it under his arm, mindful of the small, whining noises that come from it.

”So, you’re going to be a boy, now? Is that right?” he asks Senku.

Senku swallows and nods glumly.

”Okay then. But you’re not going learn how to do that alone.”

-

Dr. Koh is a balding, middle-aged man with narrow glasses and Buddha ears. He specialises in Gender Identity Disorders, although one of the first things he told Byakuya on the phone is that the term is a complete misnomer. Nothing wrong with these kids, he said, they just are they way they are. When he and Senku come in for an appointment, Koh greets them warmly and shakes Byakuya’s hand. Then he smiles at Senku, puts his palms on his knees and bends down. ”And a good afternoon to you, too. You’re Senku, right?”

”I looked up your résumé,” Senku tells him. ”Some other doctors had more impressive backgrounds, but dad thinks you’re the best pick.” Behind her back, Byakuya shrugs and mouths _what can you do_.

The appointment lasts for two hours. Dr. Koh interviews them and makes Byakuya and Senku both fill out numerous forms and questionnaires. When Senku complains about the questions that are meant for children, Byakuya okays Dr. Koh to give her the adult versions instead.

”Just skip the questions that don’t apply to you,” Koh advises her, ”like questions about puberty or dating.”

” _Obviously_ ,” she says.

-

Senku is very quiet on the way back. Byakuya decides to take her to their favourite ramen place, but it doesn’t seem to cheer her up much. She picks at her food instead of inhaling it like usual.

”What’s up, kiddo?” he asks. ”Too much excitement for one day?”

Senku recovers for the two seconds it takes to scoff in response. Then she shrinks in on herself. ”There were questions about breasts on the forms,” she says, small and subdued. ”I’m going to get them, aren’t I? I don’t want breasts, dad. Do you think I can skip that part somehow?”

That night, after putting Senku to bed, Byakuya googles for hours and reads every article he can get his hands on about treatments for trans kids. In the morning, he calls Dr. Koh again.

Senku is still asleep when he goes to wake her for school. ”Hey, kiddo.” He ruffles her messy hair and tries not to laugh at the bleary-eyed expression on her little face. ”I have news for you. I looked some things up, and I found out that there’s this medicine called puberty blockers. We can get those for you later, so - _ta-dah!_ No breasts. How’s that sound?”

The smile he’s gifted with is blinding.

-

Byakuya learns to say _he_ and _his_ and _my son_. He practices in front of the bathroom mirror while he’s trimming his beard and makes faces at himself when he gets it wrong. He also gets progressively louder, until Senku pokes his head in through the door to say ”Dad _what_ are you doing,” and makes him drop his shaver into the wash basin.

The conversation with Senku’s teacher, Mr. Oda, goes better than he expected. He brings a written statement from Dr. Koh, and they hash out the practical details in twenty minutes. Thank heavens he and Senku live in Tokyo; he doesn’t want to know how this might have gone somewhere more rural.

Once they’re done, Mr. Oda asks if he has any recommendations for science books that Senku hasn’t read yet. To answer the unspoken question, he digs into his desk and shows Byakuya three haikus about Nicola Tesla that Senku wrote in class. One of them involves the famous Death Ray and half of it is in _math_. Mr. Oda looks pleadingly at Byakuya.

In the end, they spend another thirty minutes compiling a list of books that aren’t in the school library, and which Senku will be given access to once he completes his poetry assignments properly.

Back home, Senku immediately contest the claim that his haikus aren’t up to snuff. He demonstrates by reciting the Death Ray one out loud. To Byakuya’s amazement, it _works_. Well, the math is a hash, but it’s definitely a _haiku_. He films Senku reading it and sends the video to Mr. Oda. A couple of hours later, he gets a grudging reply declaring it acceptable.

Oda need not have worried. Once Senku learns about the reading list, he plows through his assignments in record time. Just in case, Byakuya extracts a promise that if he does something creative with mathematical symbols again, he will turn in a video instead of a paper.

-

They attend peer group meetings for families of trans kids when Byakuya finds a local organisation that offers those. It’s more mundane than he expected. He usually drinks tea and chats with the staff and other parents while Senku hangs out with the other children.

The first time they go, it takes all of fifteen minutes before Senku is sitting on the floor, surrounded by a cluster of kids, holding up a brochure and explaining what GnRH agonists are and how they work. Most of the other kids look mystified, including the ones who are much older, but one girl seems to understand chemistry and asks Senku questions about what he says. He answers promptly and then launches into a monologue about peptides that everyone else loses track of within seconds.

”That’s my boy,” Byakuya proudly tells the bemused adults.

He’s given an assortment of brochures, including the one Senku used as a teaching aid. Senku and the chemistry girl trade email addresses. When they’re leaving, one of the parents hands Byakuya a rectangular pin that has horizontal blue, pink and white stripes. She tells him it’s a flag for trans people.

-

Byakyua wears the pin to work. At lunch, Dr. Kawakami from biochem asks him what it is. After he explains, she says that she thinks it isn’t really decent for a teacher to openly promote fetishes on campus. Byakuya calmly tells her that that is a very damaging misconception and that there’s a lot more variety among humanity than people are used to thinking there is. She shoots back that his idealism is commendable but he still shouldn’t be encouraging impressionable young minds to act abnormally.

Byakuya puts his chopsticks down, inhales loudly through his nose and and stares at her. She says that surely he understands the responsibility and moral authority that come with being an educator. He says nothing. She makes a few more attempts along the same lines before awkwardly tapering off. Byakuya continues staring. After a couple of minutes, Kawakami excuses herself and leaves with her tray. Byakuya turns in his seat and keeps looking at her as she makes her way through the dishwasher line, and all the way to the entrace. She keeps glacing nervously over her shoulder.

”I had no idea you could look that scary,” his postgrad student Yosano tells him once Kawakami has disappeared. ”How do you _not blink?_ ”

”Honestly, though,” visiting professor Larsson says through a mouthful of wakame, ”the manners of some people. What is this, the stone age?”

"It's actually more of an imported 19th century notion, I looked it up because a co-author of my last paper--"

"Work talk over lunch! You owe us all dessert now!"

-

For the rest of the week, every time Byakuya sees Dr. Kawakami, he stops what he’s doing and stares. When she tries to stare back, he points two fingers at his eyes and then at her. On the third day, she opens the staff room door, sees him at the table, and closes it again.

Next week rolls in and Byakuya goes back to acting like he always does. Kawakami does not say a single word about abnormality around him again. The pin stays on the lapel of his coat.

It becomes something of a thing. Byakuya picks up a mug with the flag at one of the family meetings and keeps it in the staff room cupboard. Yosano gives him a mousepad with the colours. The next time he runs out of chalk, he orders new packets in white, blue and pink. Maybe he’s daring people to make something of it again.

When someone uses the chalks during a break to doodle a smattering of flowers with distinctly familiar colours in the middle of the lecture hall blackboard, Byakuya stands in front of it and considers it carefully. Then he picks up the chalks and, while his entire Introduction to Astrophysics course watches, adds thick edges in appropriate colours until he has a familiar rectangle with its five stripes. He teaches the class by scrawling all his notes around the artwork. Students take far more pictures of the blackboard than they usually bother with. It may have something to do with the similarly coloured planet and rocket that he drew to illustrate the Tsiolkovsky equation.

He gets exactly one complaint from a blustering young man who struggles to explain what he’s objecting to. Afterwards, students he’s pretty sure have never sat in on his lectures start greeting him in the hallways.

-

When JAXA issues a call for astronaut applications, Byakuya feels a rush and a pang at the same time. He could still qualify, might even have better chances this time around, despite his age. However, he’s not a starry-eyed youngster any more; he has a child and stable job now. Things would be far more complicated, even if he somehow did get in.

Then Senku makes him a horrible electric suit and almost drowns him in a swimming pool. He and Taiju stand at the pool’s edge and watch him flail, immensely proud of what they've wrought. Senku has even worn a bow tie for the occasion. Byakuya suddenly remembers seeing him arrange electrodes on an anatomical model and wondering what he was up to; his boy must have been working on this thing for days.

In that moment, he decides that no matter the outcome, he’s going to sign up for the exam and give it all he’s got.

He starts going to the pool twice every single day, before and after work. He gets a special permit to swim with clothes on and spends the first two days clinging to the edges. Other swimmers give him a wide berth. He keeps going anyway, and gradually he gets better at it. He cooks more vegetables for he and Senku’s dinners, starts biking to work instead of taking the train, and even takes magnesium supplements to fend off further surprise cramps.

All that preparation pays off when, two months later, he clears the swimming test. JAXA-provided clothes are admittedly easier to swim in than the baggy overalls he practiced with. It also doesn’t hurt that the last ten years have bolstered his academic credit significantly. The motivational interview is the least certain part of the whole thing, but finally the results arrive: he’s in.

He leaves work early, picks Senku up from school, and they get on a train to Tsukuba Space Center, where they spend hours looking at the Kibo science module and Kounotori models, and get all the ice cream they can eat after.

Tsukuba is fortunately not far from where they live, and it’s easy for Byakuya to commute there whenever he has training. When he doesn’t, he teaches at the university. If there’s JAXA training on a day that isn’t a school day, he often brings Senku with him. When he has to go abroad for a week or a few and he can’t take his son along, his mother comes stay with Senku instead.

-

One day Senku comes home very upset. It takes a while to get to the root of what’s wrong, but apparently a girl in his class has started to develop breasts. Byakuya tries to comfort Senku by saying that there’s absolutely not a whiff of them on him, but Senku is inconsolable. Byakuya picks up the phone again.

There are three alternative delivery systems for puberty blockers: nasal sprays, injections and implants. They get a prescription for the spray, but Senku immediately starts a campaing to get an implant instead. It takes several months, plenty of wrangling, help from good Dr. Koh, Senku’s unwavering determination and Byakuya wrangling a loan from the bank, before the operation can be scheduled. Senku practically vibrates in his seat the whole trip to the clinic.

The procedure is done by a surgical nurse, with a nurse-in-training assisting. Senku watches intently as the equipment is laid out, and refuses to be distracted or to look away from the scalpel. Byakuya hovers beside him just in case, but it turns out to be unnecessary, because Senku is _fascinated_ by the whole thing. When he comments on how weird adipose tissue looks in real life and asks if he can have some to prepare a microscope slide with, the trainee nurse starts to look a little green around the gills. The surgical nurse, on the other hand, must have seen it all, because after getting a nod from Byakuya, he wordlessly extracts a speck of tissue and wipes it on the inside of a small, zippable plastic bag. Senku thanks him politely.

Once everything is done, and Senku has a few stitches and wad of gauze on his arm and the plastic bag in his hand, they offer him a congratulatory blue bandaid with pictures of cars. Byakuya expects him to refuse it on the grounds of it being childish.

”Can I have a different one?” Senku says instead. He eyes the box of bandaids. ”Dad and I like space better than cars.”

He gets a bandaid with rocket ships and planets on it.

-

Puberty blockers cost and arm and a leg. Byakuya had been fearing it, had been wondering whether he’d have to sell the apartment, but the JAXA traineeship fortunately provides enough income that he can pay off the loan on schedule and put aside savings for the next implant, even with the steep dip in his teaching salary. Once Senku moves on to hormones, the expenses will go down. The downside of this is that Byakuya’s so busy earning that money that he's out of the house a lot more often than before.

He runs some calculations and decides to cut out the rest of his teaching hours, even if it means that things are going to get tighter. He can put off any big purchases for a couple of years in exchange of more time with his son. Senku won't be small forever, and he will not go to space just to come back home a stranger. Life is in the here and now, and there's things in it that he wants to do with his son. Such as go to the Tokyo Rainbow Pride, which neither of them has seen yet. So when April rolls around, Byakuya and Senku hop on a train and head downtown.

Their first impressions are lots of noise, lots of people and lots of colour. Byakuya finds them a timetable, rainbow flags and a hat that Senku immediately dubs ”dumb” and refuses to have anything to do with. A tall, friendly woman at an accessories stand compliments Senku’s atomic model shirt and asks him if he wants to have something painted on his cheeks. Senku picks the trans flag. Once it’s done and he sees himself in the mirror, he looks terribly young and unsure. Byakuya sits down next and tells the woman that he’ll have the same, except on his entire face. He tells Senku that he isn’t allowed to look before it’s done. When Senku sees the finished product, he starts to laugh and tells Byakuya that he looks like a soccer hooligan and that he’s embarrassed to be seen with him.

Half an hour later Byakuya has hoisted Senku onto his shoulders. They’re both waving their flags like madmen and yelling themselves hoarse along to a foreign pop song that’s playing on the loudspeakers, Lil’ Diva or something, with hundreds of other people around them doing the same. Senku is wearing the dumb hat.

Later Senku insists that he did no such thing. No amount of teasing gets him to own up to it, and he pretends that the selfie Byakuya snapped of them with his phone doesn’t exist. He haughtily claims that he has little appreciation for such rowdy events and has more important science business to focus on anyhow. When the next year rolls around, he sidles up to Byakuya and asks if they can go again.

-

When Byakuya’s rotation in Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center comes up, he wonders how he’s going to arrange things. His mother has hurt her hip and several months is far too long for a thirteen-year-old, even one as clever as Senku, to live on his own. NASA might offer him accommodations for two if he asks nicely, but Senku would be bored silly there with nothing to do. It seems cruel, too, to take him into the middle of all that space technology without giving him a chance to get to some of see it and try it out. He would have to take a leave from school, too - not that that would be much of a concern with his grades.

Less than two weeks after Byakuya got the announcement, Senku tells him that he has an interview for this interdisciplinary project that takes promising young students to Mali to help study filoviruses, such as Cueva, Ebola and Marburg. Medical insurance and rigorous safety training are provided. It’s conveniently at the same time as Byakuya’s rotation, starting and ending with only a few days’ difference.

Byakuya listens to Senku explain and marvels at the convenience. This is the first he’s heard of Senku being interested in infectious diseases. Then he raises his hands. ”Hang on, back up! Did you say _Ebola?_ ”

In the end, Byakuya goes to Texas alone and meets people he will one day be going to space with. Senku goes to Mali and fortunately does not die of haemorrhagic fever. He sends Byakuya long and rambling video messages about neutrophils and liver cells and long dead viruses and eggnog.

The worst message Byakuya gets is one in which Senku reports that while they were out catching bats, they met a local ranger who had recently killed a lone lion that had started lurking around the settlement. In a spirit of responsible resource management, the ranger had roasted the carcass, and offered the meat for the team try. Senku says that he ate some, and even though it's been three hours since, it was so awful that he thinks he’s going to die. In the next message, he brushess off all of Byakuya’s panicked questions and goes blithely on about the inconvenience of a damaged shipment of petri dishes.

When his second rotation in Texas is announced, the first thing Byakuya does is call his American contact to ask if he can bring his son along and get him something to do there that doesn’t involve live pathogens or dead apex predators.

Senku loves NASA, of course. Even when he has a go on the gimbal and throws up.

-

A few days after his fifteenth birthday, Senku comes home with a wide grin and says, ”Dad, I found this experimental program that I want to get into,” and Byakuya wonders if this is going to be like the Ebola thing all over again. Fortunately not; it turns out there’s a clinical research team in Canada that is preparing to run human trials on a new kind of androgen implant. It’s low-dose and specifically designed for young transitioners. Virtually no one has heard about it yet; how Senku found out is another mystery for the ages. Byakuya has learned not to question these things. Once again, he picks up the phone.

A month later, after long, arduous and occasionally tense negotiations, they fly to London, Ontario. At the end of a cab drive, a large, grey concrete building greets them. They meet the entire research team, who all apparently know Senku by name, slog through a heavy stack of papers and Byakuya signs another thick wad of them. Finally, Senku sits down in a padded chair, has a spot on his upper arm anaesthesized and receives one of the first extremely slow release HRT pellets in the world. His job will be to monitor the effects and keep a log, which he probably would be doing anyway. If the implant works the way it’s supposed to, it will last up to fifteen years. Senku looks at the wad of gauze taped to his arm like he can’t quite believe it’s there.

Byakuya digs into his pocket, triumphantly pulls out two bandaids and sticks them on top of the gauze. The first one has planets on it, and the other one has rocket ships.

”Wow, thanks dad,” Senku deadpans, but his eyes shine.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I've finished and posted online in eight years. I feel proud and nervous at the same time! I've also never written and posted a fic with a trans character before, and I'm proud and nervous about that too. 
> 
> Fun fact: Dr. Jun Koh is an actual person. According to a news article from 2016, he’s one of the medical professionals in Japan working for trans rights, and has been helping trans children and their families at least since 2014. I have not actually seen his résumé, but I assume it’s impressive enough. Littler Senku is no better at this Random Blunt Observation thing than bigger Senku is.
> 
> The Canadian medical researchers and their super-slow-release HRT implant are, sadly, not real. Hormone replacement therapy tends not to be available for minors, either, and puberty blockers can but may not always be started early. The description of Senku's transition is partially speculative, rather than wholly based on real-world examples, because I intend to write more about this Senku and I’m 10 billion percent committed to spinning things in a way that makes being trans just a personal detail about him, instead of a source of woe and hardship in a stone world. A bit of Sufficiently Advanced Technology does the trick, and it doesn't seem like much of a stretch in a canon where all of humanity gets turned into stone by a green light anyway.
> 
> A lot of research on details went into the making of this fic. I didn’t find everything I looked for and resorted to guesses, so if you see something that you know doesn’t work like that (apart from the magic transition), you're welcome to let me know!


End file.
